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Tuesday, 9 April 2013

Features: The Hate Camel cometh

A Horsforth writer has bucked the trend and has unleashed his own unique take on the print magazine to an unsuspecting public.

The Hate Camel is a magazine that harks back to the days of early 90s grunge ‘zines, with a mish-mash of handwritten and typed articles being stuck down and photocopied onto low quality paper. The magazine’s founder, Stevie Kilgour, 30, said: “The whole basis of it is satire. It’s an opportunity for Leeds to take a look at itself and have a good laugh. It started off as a bit of fun. I wanted to poke fun at the glossy magazine culture in Leeds – they’re about 90 percent adverts, five percent listings, and maybe five percent interest in what’s going on.”

Instead of your usual magazine fare, Stevie wants to publish bizarre and unusual writing that would never make into a commercial magazine such as unedited free-writing, and hate-filled teenage stories. He said: “Parts of it are handwritten. I’ve had one contribution that was an old birthday card that contained very vicious story from when they were in school about setting fire to a ginger kid. It’s obviously complete fairytale, perhaps more nightmare, but I’ve photocopied that, cut it out, stuck it down with gaffer tape, and sent it off to the printers so that it looks even more tatty than it did first time round.”

Stevie hopes that The Hate Camel will offend and outrage its readers, but hopes that this will encourage people to get involved in something more akin to a collaborative art project than a traditional magazine. He said: “I’m hoping that people will pick it up and, through beer-glazed eyes, be absolutely outraged by it. Then you’ll find someone with the same twisted and dark sense of humour as me and think that it is absolute genius and want get involved with it themselves.”

Stevie explained that he wanted the magazine to be in print form only, and have no online version. He said: “The whole idea of it not being online is just to make people work for it. There’s so much information out there that is just given to people. I want to make people go out and find it, as opposed to getting it straight onto their smartphones and iPads.”

You won’t find The Hate Camel on the shelves of your local newsagent. The magazine is free, and is distributed haphazardly around some of the bars and pubs in Leeds. Stevie said: “We’ve got 300 copies that we will be distributing around various bars. We’re not going to keep going back to the same places.”